


and i wanted to fail (but i tried)

by skvadern



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bondage, Collars, Dom/sub, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Mind Control, Or Is It?, Season/Series 02, Self-Harm, The Web Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), Web Avatar Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, mildly malevolent caretaking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:47:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27272905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skvadern/pseuds/skvadern
Summary: There's a stranger in Jon's flat.No, there isn't.
Relationships: Annabelle Cane/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 7
Kudos: 100
Collections: Femdom Exchange 2020





	and i wanted to fail (but i tried)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [screechfox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/screechfox/gifts).



There’s a bracelet of spiderweb around his wrist, and Jon doesn’t know when it got there. It’s almost invisible, only flashing silver-pale when the light catches it, impossibly intricate in its weave. Beautiful, perhaps, if it weren’t that sticky, half-fluid string he’s seen draping a thousand forgotten corners; if it weren’t on _him_.

The skin around it is flushed and hot where he’s been picking frantically, burning with the friction of his useless twisting. It hurts, but he just can’t stop; at least the pain keeps his skin from crawling quite so violently.

He darts a panicked glance into the kitchen, where his largest knife is sitting out on the jumbled pile of scissors and smaller knives he’s tried and failed to wriggle under the silk. The blade glints at him, and he shudders, jerking his head away. His panicking brain dredges up Nicole Baxter’s follow-up interview, the twist in her voice when she’d said ‘workplace accident’. Wishes bitterly he was that brave.

“Careful,” Annabelle Cane says from the sofa.

Jon turns slowly to face her, waiting for the mule’s kick of terror in his chest, for the bottom to drop out of his stomach. It doesn’t come; the hunched shape curled into his cushions _fits_ into his mental picture of the room. As if he’d known she was there before she spoke.

How does he even know who she is? There hadn’t been nearly enough description in Mr Harlow’s statement to identify her on sight. When she turns her head to look at him, the glinting, matted mass of spiderweb covering one side of her skull, sickly white against her dark skin, sends a sick thrill through his gut – but he hadn’t seen it when he’d spotted her on his sofa just now. Jon just… knows that this woman in his flat is Annabelle Cane, the same way he knows the names and faces of any other person he’s met several times before.

Because he’s met her, several times, before.

“Careful of what?” he snaps, and Annabelle smiles. She has a lovely smile. Her teeth are crocked, and very white.

“We don’t want you to hurt yourself, Jon,” she replies, and Jon feels his stomach tighten, a prickling flush rise to his cheeks. As it always does when someone uses that tone, as if he’s a child who doesn’t know what’s good for him.

Then… then the anger fades, as if someone’s drawn a clinging veil across his gut, smothering the emotion in reams of sticky silk. He tries frantically to grasp for it, but a deadened calm filters in to take its place, and no matter how hard he fights –

He hasn’t been sleeping well. Not since Prentiss. The calm isn’t _good_ , but it’s not the gnawing, ravenous paranoia, and it’s not the fear he’s come to know so well he thinks it must have soaked into his bones. It’s… peaceful. The sort of peace that comes from know that, for better or for worse, he’s no longer in charge.

Blinking passed the glinting web at the corners of his vision, he studies Annabelle Cane. She’s skinny, spindly really, with an unhealthy grey undertone to her skin. “Would you like some tea?” he says – ridiculous, inane, _painfully_ British.

Annabelle grins. “No, though it’s kind of you to offer. “I would like you to come here, though.” She points, not to the sofa she’s curled on, but to the floor below her.

Jon walks across the room and sinks easily to his knees, joints fluid and loose. He wonders, a thought divorced from any feeling, if he’ll find bands of spiderweb at those joints as well, invisible and intangible. Beautiful, secret little puppet strings.

Only when Annabelle’s slim, cold hand cups his cheek, does Jon remember to be terrified. He freezes dead – no matter how badly he wants to throw himself backwards, away from the spider-filled _thing_ sitting on his sofa, he can’t move. Can barely breathe.

“It’s okay, Jon,” Annabelle murmurs. This close, he can smell the dust on her breath, and nothing else. She’s an abandoned building, Jon thinks, a little delirious. All hollow and empty and sheet-covered inside. “You’re not going to remember this anyway. Why not relax, yeah?”

Her thigh isn’t particularly soft, or warm, but Jon’s head is so _heavy_ , his brain half-calcified by long nights and broken sleep and constant, thrumming _fear_. It’s easier to let it loll, let tension he’s been holding for longer than he can remember ease out from his shoulders. Muscles are, after all, only threads.

Jon’s hands, he notices, are behind him, wrists crossed neatly at the small of his back. He wants to pull on them, but doesnt. Somehow he knows that there’s another band of cobweb locked around his other wrist, and he doesn’t know if he’d prefer they be tied together or not. Would it be better or worse, if he could move them apart?

When had the other bracelet – cuff, the other cuff – appeared? How long has his skin not been his own?

He remembers the people in the statement, the _projectors_ – can visualise their eerie, perfectly coordinated dance as if he’d watched it himself. All the other statements about spiders, how they always seemed to be linked to something else taking control of people, changing their thoughts and behaviour, _moving_ them. Remembers chasing after a boy that loomed so large in his childish eyes, walking stiff and steady to his death. The spindly limbs that had dwarfed him as they’d snatched him off the doorstep.

“Am I… am I in control of any of this?” he mumbles into her thigh, and Annabelle laughs.

“You know,” she replies, “I’m actually probably the least qualified person to tell you that. Control, power, agency… I don’t really understand them anymore.” She scratches lightly at his scalp; Jon thinks of skittering little legs, and hates that he is still comforted. “What I can tell you is that I’m not making you stay curled up so prettily at my feet. This one’s all on you, darling.”

There is no reason to believe her, none at all, and frankly Jon has no idea if he wants her to be lying or not. Again - which would be worse?

Annabelle’s fingers keep moving through his hair, gentle and soft and horrifyingly nice. “You’re going to be perfect, sweetheart. Absolutely perfect.” Her other hand slips down to his neck, fingers rub indulgently against the skin of his throat. The sensation is just a little duller than he might expect, and Jon is suddenly certain that if he looks in a mirror he’ll see the collar, the band of glittering thread winding over his airways and arteries. Ready to tighten.

“But you’re not ready yet,” she continues, smiling indulgently down at him. “So you’re going to have to forget this, when I go.”

Jon nods, already resigned to it. No doubt this has happened dozens of times before, and if he couldn’t stop her then, how does he propose to now? He’s… tired.

A thumb tucks itself under his eye, soothing the embarrassing sting. “So how about we have a nice, relaxing evening in,” Annabelle says, voice gone a little sing-song. Like she’s talking to a pet. “I’ll put the telly on, order us a takeaway – you’re skin and bone, Jon, honestly, I’m beginning to think you _need_ someone to take care of you.”

“Lucky I have you, then,” he mutters, words as caustic as he can make them, and Annabelle laughs like a bell.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, slipping her feet into his lap as she reaches for the remote. “Lucky indeed.”


End file.
